Local foundation helps young cancer patients deal with financial issues related to diagnosis

Saturday

Oct 6, 2012 at 12:01 AMOct 6, 2012 at 6:19 AM

This summer, before her chemotherapy treatments would allow Kay Foley to return to work, the family mortgage payments for May and June were unpaid, and July was creeping up fast.

Michael Holtzman

This summer, before her chemotherapy treatments would allow Kay Foley to return to work, the family mortgage payments for May and June were unpaid, and July was creeping up fast.

After 19 years, most spent as a supervisor, of working in “the donut world,” as she put it, the mother of two teens, ages 15 and 19, and her fiancé’s 18-year-old, had already borrowed from her 401(k).

She couldn’t let the $158.20 a week for her health care lapse.

But when one’s out of work for five months, the bills start piling up, Foley explained one afternoon at the Dunkin’ Donuts on County Street in Somerset. She’s worked there for the past seven years.

After she was diagnosed Jan. 23 with the second stage of a rare metaplastic breast cancer, she left work within a week and had lumpectomy surgery while undergoing three types of aggressive chemotherapy treatments.

With maybe an inch of light-colored, wispy hair that’s now grown back for a month, the 37-year-old Foley thought back to those hard financial times in between directing where the donut trays and white donation sponsor signs for Dunkin’ Donuts’ Special Olympics benefit should go.

Even with her partner, George, being a mechanic, the loss of a second income was taking its toll on the family, she said.

The oil tank would get empty. The food bill for three teens couldn’t be kept up with, and they’d apply for free lunch at school. Things like golf and dirt biking were out of the question, and their young adult children would chip in for gas and car insurance, reasoning “Mom is sick, so let’s try to help out.”

As she told her story with an energy and smile that belied the neuropathy in her feet and fingertips, a man giving his coffee order asked, “Are you George’s fiancé? I gave my wife a kidney,” he related, “and I heard all about you.

“Congrats! Keep fighting!” he told Kay Foley.

Never sugar-coating her story, at the core of it was a memorable moment that contributed to the family’s financial recovery.

She said the oncology department at Southcoast Health System had contacted Julia Saulino of the Financial Lift for Young Adults Foundation for her.

Saulino had started FLY with her lawyer husband, Peter, in December 2010 — about six months after she had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.

Julia Saulino, an engineer at Raytheon who recently turned 29, said she was sensitive and empathized with young adults with first apartments and homes or college loans whose dreams seemed dashed by the financial crush cancer can create.

FLY gives out grants, mostly related to living expenses, for people in active cancer treatment between ages 19 and 39 who live in Massachusetts or Rhode Island.

When grants are awarded, the check is paid directly to where the bills are due, Saulino said.

Foley remembers the email last summer from the FLY Foundation that their monthly mortgage of just under $1,350 for the three-bedroom home she bought five years ago would be paid for two months, nearly $2,700.

“I wanted to cry,” she said. “It’s almost too good to be true.”
“Are you serious?” George asked her.

Now, “when anything comes up with her name,” Foley said of Julia Saulino, George immediately volunteers, “Oh, yeah, we’re there.”

The FLY Foundation in less than two years has given out 20 grants totaling $35,000. They’ve included four to breast cancer patients like Foley; the other three going to New Bedford women to pay three months of $500 rent; a past-due car insurance bill of $800 and $700 for the electric bill to restore service, Saulino said.

FLY’s raised more than $100,000 in donations, and the founders are particularly proud that no qualified applicant has been turned down. The immediate goal: that the record stays intact one year from now.

“She helped us out a great deal,” Foley said of her benefactor.

When asked if her home was in jeopardy of foreclosure, Foley said, “Absolutely.”

She and George were being called “three or four times a day” by the bank for payment, she said.

“I just know my mortgage got paid because of her. If it hadn’t been for her and her husband, I don’t think we’d have a home right now.”

Kay Foley was raised in Fall River and has worked about half her life in “the donut world” — at Bess Eaton, Tim Hortons and Dunkin’ — has had numerous people to be appreciative of as she finishes her last few days of daily radiation treatments after work and “keeps my fingers crossed.”

Even though she’s borrowed and depleted her savings, she returned to work on Aug. 20 with a $2,900 health insurance bill. Her boss, Bob Mongeon, who owns other Dunkin’ shops, told her to pay “whatever you’ve got, whenever you’ve got it.” She was never was asked for anything.

There’s also one person she particularly wants to thank for catching her cancer when she did. It’s someone whose name she can’t recall, though she can place him distinctly from 25 years ago.

He was her health teacher in the seventh grade at the old Henry Lord Middle School.

It’s why, in November, she knew to check — and found a lump in her breast “the size of a pea.” In December when she checked again. “I freaked out. It was the size of a quarter,” she said.

Of her Henry Lord health teacher, Foley said “remember him saying, ‘When you girls get older, make sure you check your breasts on a regular basis.’”

She plans to return to her former school to find her health teacher and thank him.